Background
Personal
In hindsight, my identity as a composer and musician has its roots in misuse from the very beginning. As a teenager, what led me into music was the noise, ambient and industrial community of Malmö, the city adjacent to where I grew up.
Therefore, my first creative musical practice was no-input mixing1, a practice typical of these scenes, where feedback loops are generated within mixing boards, often processed through effect pedals. I hid away in my room with only a thin wooden door protecting my parents and siblings from the distorted screeching of several hour-long jams.
This has been fundamental in shaping my musical interests. It gave me a preoccupation with sound texture, and most importantly textural shifts. It also gave me a very early appreciation for very noisy textures specifically, and an acceptance and appreciation for abstract structure.
This eventually led me towards contemporary art music as well as electroacoustic music, which started my journey in music academia. Therefore, while my academic journey certainly further widened my perspective on what music at the avant garde could be, what ended up challenging me more was having to catch up on the fundamental craftsmanship as well as the history and tradition that my DIY background had not given me.
While I was learning how to write scores and engage with ensembles on the one hand, on the other hand I was learning the ropes of music production.
In the journey of learning Ableton Live and how to make what would be considered a well-produced track, I disconnected from my experimental practice to learn fundamentals.
In this project I am, in a sense, simply defining and bringing back my old creative philosophy in the context of my current tools and creative outputs. I am, so to speak, reconnecting with my roots and finding out how to re-apply them in a new setting.
As mentioned earlier I use Ableton Live, and I consider it both my instrument of choice as well as the site of a major part of my creative activity. In my experience it functions much better as a creative tool in comparison with alternative DAWs like Logic, Pro Tools etc. and at this point I have developed a refined understanding of it.
With the knowledge I have I must therefore recognize that the possibilities available within the software are too vast for me to possibly hope to be comprehensive within the scope of this project, as Ableton contains just about every tool that a music producer could desire, all with possibilities to explore. I therefore encourage the reader to explore these possibilities on their own, and consider my examples as simply a starting point.
Expanding DAW usage
My efforts in learning and deepening my skills in using Ableton Live have lead me to a realize the limited scope with which music production is taught.
Very likely, the average person who learns a DAW does not do it through an academic institution, but rather through online video material. In such material, the focus tends to be on basic navigation of the software, followed by explanations of the different plugin tools as they are to be used in traditional music production focused on recording bands and artists. There also exists material aimed at producers who wish to focus on different types of EDM genres. Such material will explain the basics of electronic mixing as well as an explanation of different conventions of synthesis and conventional signal processing for samples.
The DAWs themselves are also set up for this type of use in the structure of their user interfaces and in their available presets. I hope in this thesis to instead develop an alternative attitute towards the DAW that actively goes against these conventions.
My interest in this started when listening to the late acclaimed producer SOPHIE2. She was fundamental in defining the hyperpop genre and made use of extreme artificiality both in her aural and visual aesthetic.
While her music at first listen has a very rigid pop structure, her early singles especially contain a multitude of sounds that could hardly be generated using any conventional techniques. The sounds are best described as a sort of synthetic squelching, bubbling and squealing, often lacking any sense of tonality and seeming of a completely unexplainable origin. This sort of sound world is in my opinion what allowed her a hybrid existence as both an experimental icon and a mainstream pop producer.
Knowing that we use largely the same or similar tools, a lot of my early experimentation was in attempting to recreate her style of sounds. I therefore bear a lot of thankfulness towards her in inspiring me towards this project.